Savoring life. Writing on experiences. Moments and milestones in equal measure.

Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Nairobi Matatus and their Awful Music

Nairobi Matatus and theAwfully
loud Music.

I can talk
about music for hours on end. Not the singing part but the sound reproduction
part and especially the end product of a sound system. This pretty much makes
me an Audiophile. Now before I lose some of your here let’s talk about
Audiophiles. Audiophiles are peeps that care so much about sound and audio
stuff than the rest of us (us means you in this case). They are also good at it
and can tell what is good and what is not. I happen to be such, I am a sound
freak, I get annoyed by poor quality audio especially in live events though I
am not gonna talk about events here especially the untrained DJs killing us
with bad music.

I am going to talk about the bad Githurai and
Umoiner buses killing us with bad music. Let me take you back a little. It is
in 2014 and I am fresh from college working as an intern in a government
ministry and living in a bedsitter somewhere along Thika Road. My daily routine
meant I had to somehow board the ANNOYING Route 45 buses (the infamous Githurai
Buses) and man this was the worst part of my days...who fixes sound for these
guys?? My mornings and evenings were very ruined by whoever these guys were. I
can choke at these memories.

Let me give you
a peek into what it means travelling in that bus. So you come to the bus stop
half-walking half-running because you are getting late, you find no vehicle so
you wait anxiously. 10 minutes later, the big buses appear at a frightening
speed and screeches just some meters away from where you guys are standing (you
always find a crowd of people in a predicament as yours so you sail in the same
boat henceforth). By now the driver has turned down the music and the bus is
pretty much ‘boardable’. You hurriedly get in and because it already had
passengers the only seats are available are at the back of the bus. You find
yourself a nice seat and sink in with gladness in you - finally you are going
to get to work. A minute or two and the bus is full so you start off to
town...2 minutes into the journey, the music is turned up and the tweeters are
vehemently screaming into your ears...hoping this is all you cringe in your
seat and wish for the quickest arrival.

Hardly will you
have nursed the tweeter annoyance before you are almost ripped apart by the
boom that will come from a rugged woofer placed underneath the backseat. You
get fought by the music..it literally hurts physically. It is like someone
beating your eardrums with big drum sticks. And the bass...one chic friend of
mine described it as “Inagongea kwa roho”..because it literally shakes you from
within. 20 minutes into the journey and you can barely hear yourself think and
so you just gaze at your phone like an immobilized person. And mark you this
are not the buses where you read stuff because you can’t...just can’t. Also you
can’t talk over the annoyingly loud music, and who even talks to strangers on a
public bus?

The torture
will continue and in less than 40 minutes you will be in the CBD and these guys
will generously turn down the music once there. A funny thing though is that
the ‘Makanga will be told by a bold soul to ‘Punguza’ the volume of the music
somewhere in the middle of the short but ear-wrecking journey but will quickly
respond “Huyu driver huwa hapunguzi” Once you are out of that bus it will take
a cup of hot masala tea with brown mandazis and approximately an hour to get
you back to reality – to wade off the sounds of the musical massacre. You’re
damned if your board one with a TV screen inside...the noise will be nothing
compared to the explicit stuff being shown - you will get out of there a
corrupted soul. I once board such and I have never seen so much of
behind-shaking as i did in those less than 40 minutes.

So this was
what I went through for 3 months every morning and evening and its usually
worse in the evenings because they overload so the bus also becomes
stuffy....The only thing that differentiates the a Githurai bus and a nightclub
is that one is moving and the other is stationary. So I can’t help but wonder
which morons fix the sound systems for these buses because one big problem is
not the loud music but the poor quality loud music. Nothing sound alright, the
woofer is distorted and too boomy for a any size of a bus, the tweeters are too
loud for the woofer and they are badly equalized. If you travel in these things
for a year you will seriously develop hearing complications along the way.

Note: This is not where you say
if its too loud then you are too old..nah...i never complain of loud
hometheatres

3 comments:

Actually the system is not even the biggest problem but the people who operate the systems-why for heavenly sake put it at the highest volume mpaka the seats are vibrating?. It is even worse the honking in this buses (githurai ones) they start honking at 3am and stop at midnight. The honk can be heard a kilometre away.